Life After AdTech: What Happens When You Stop Optimizing Clicks and Start Building Aircraft?
- 1 day ago
- 46 min read
What happens when an early Amazon engineer who helped pioneer automated advertising leaves AdTech behind to build the world’s fastest airliner?
In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Blake Scholl, Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, for a conversation about aviation, AI, entrepreneurship, and the pursuit of ambitious ideas. Before founding Boom, Blake worked on early internet advertising systems at Amazon and experienced the rise of AdTech during Groupon’s hypergrowth years before turning his attention to one of engineering’s hardest challenges: reviving commercial supersonic flight.
The conversation explores what Blake learned from Amazon, why he believes Groupon missed a massive opportunity, and how short-term thinking can limit innovation. He also shares stories about early AdTech, lessons from Jeff Bezos, and Boom Supersonic’s mission to bring back faster-than-sound commercial travel.
The conversation covers:
Blake Scholl’s journey from Amazon and Groupon to Boom Supersonic
Early AdTech, automated advertising, and internet growth stories
Lessons from Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s long-term thinking culture
Why innovation in aviation stalled after Concorde
Building Boom Supersonic and navigating near-collapse moments
The failed Rolls-Royce partnership and Boom’s engine strategy
AI, entrepreneurship, and the future of hard-tech companies
Why AI may create more entrepreneurs than ever before
Whether you're interested in aviation, startups, AI, or innovation itself, this episode explores what happens when someone stops optimizing digital systems and starts building physical ones.
Watch the full episode and join the conversation.
🔑 What We Cover💡 Key Takeaways🎯 Why This Episode Matters
Read the full transcript below.
Brett House (00:01)
Hey everybody, welcome back to Signal and Noise. This is Brett House joined by my co-host Rio Longacre. Today we've got a great guest and certainly a little different than a lot of the guests that we have, although there are some similarities in terms of what we typically cover in MarTech and AdTech. His name is Blake Scholl, the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic. Welcome to the show, Blake.
Blake (00:21)
Glad to be here. Thank you for having me.
Brett House (00:23)
Yeah, and so those that don't know what Boom Supersonic does, they're the company working on building the world's fastest airliner and bringing back commercial supersonic travel, which is super exciting. We call that sort of hard tech. ⁓ And before ⁓ founding Boom in 2014, you spent a decade in the technology industry, including roles at Amazon, which we talked about, which we'll dive into some of that.
Rio (00:44)
An early employee
at Amazon. I'm excited to dig into that.
Brett House (00:47)
Yeah. And you worked on automated advertising systems, helping shape some of the early technologies that would eventually ⁓ influence modern digital advertising and recommendation engines. And then you were at Pelago. Is it Pelago or Pelago? Pelago. And Kima Labs, the latter of which you co-founded. And Kima was, ⁓ you guys pioneered mobile shopping and payments, and it was acquired by Groupon in 2012, right?
Blake (01:00)
Hell yeah.
⁓ That's way too much credit for what we did. That ⁓ was basically a failed startup that got Aqua hired. So we could talk about that, but it was not a...
Brett House (01:15)
Hahaha!
⁓ The story
Rio (01:20)
And then you were a group on during like.
Brett House (01:21)
looks
so much stronger on LinkedIn. thought, he's exited this company. He's a...
Blake (01:24)
⁓ I mean, the
Rio (01:26)
No, but Brett, he was a Groupon
Blake (01:26)
never
Rio (01:27)
during like the boom years, right?
Blake (01:27)
believe what you read on LinkedIn. no. ⁓ Chemo Labs was we can talk about this, but it was it was not a success story. We kind of got the diving save from Groupon ⁓ and that, you know, that that in some ways led me to what I get to do now. So I'm actually kind of glad it wasn't a success. ⁓ Absolutely.
Brett House (01:37)
Okay.
Yeah, sometimes we learn a lot from our failures, don't
So it's a and then you were driven by this belief that innovation in aviation is stalled. I've certainly I've certainly heard a lot of Neil deGrasse Tyson, interestingly, talking on that topic for some reason. ⁓ And then you left this this world of sort of ad tech, mar tech ⁓ and founded this company. It's super exciting that you've and we're here to really talk about your career trajectory, which is
certainly unusual in the aviation industry, but also in our industry moving into kind of this hard tech world. Welcome to the show and Blake, glad to have you. So what did I miss and what would you, if you had to describe, guess, in a hundred words or less your career trajectory and what brought you?
Blake (02:20)
Glad to be here.
Yeah,
in a certain sense, my career is a total, like, bizarro discontinuity. Because I went to school for computer science. ⁓ I was something like engineer number 200 at Amazon. I was early, but I wasn't that early. ⁓ But I got to do some pretty cool things, including ⁓ Amazon's first ad buy from Google. And basically got to pioneer automated customer acquisition on the internet.
Brett House (02:44)
Yeah.
Blake (02:57)
⁓ And I was lucky to do that when I was something like 24. And when it was broken, the person telling me how broken that was and how I'd screwed up was Jeff Bezos. I was incredibly lucky. ⁓ As part of that, ⁓ yeah, I found him to be extremely fair. And we can go talk about that. But I really admire him as a leader. And he was not the stereotypical I yell at you person. If you knew what you were doing and you were accountable for your mistakes, ⁓ Jeff was very forgiving. ⁓
Brett House (03:06)
Yeah.
Rio (03:07)
He could give some tough lessons from what I hear too, right?
Blake (03:27)
⁓ But the, so one of the things I got to do at Amazon was take down AdWords because we bought too many ads all at the same time. It literally crashed the AdWords server. ⁓ Yeah, yeah, so that was an Amazon adventure. After that, I kind of had ⁓ misadventures on the internet with mostly startups that didn't work. So was first employed at Pelago that had been founded by ⁓
Jeff Holden, who was the head of consumer at Amazon and had worked with Jeff Bezos and Wall Street before Amazon got founded. And that company basically didn't work. And I left it after about four five years. was doing, you it was like Foursquare meets Google Maps ⁓ meets Yelp. Yeah, with location data. It was early local mobile social. ⁓ Like it was literally Foursquare plus Google Maps plus Yelp on a Motorola razor in 2006.
Rio (04:08)
We're doing with location data like early in this early in a social game, huh?
Blake (04:22)
⁓ So it was probably early. Yeah, we had real-time phone rendered vector maps on a Motorola Razr in 2006. Yeah.
Rio (04:23)
ahead of its time.
Brett House (04:24)
Yeah, the flip phone with the little, you pull out your little antenna.
in the green screen. That's incredible.
Rio (04:34)
The networking wasn't
there. Certainly the hardware wasn't where you needed it to be back then.
Blake (04:38)
No.
then iPhone came and ironically, we were late to realize that it was the only device that mattered. ⁓ I think Pelago kind of died a death of too many good ideas. If we'd had just one of those, it could have worked. The problem was we tried to be all of them all at the same time with a tiny team. So I ended up leaving Pelago ⁓ and ⁓ went on and started Kima Labs. And then why was it Kima? Pelago got acquired by Groupon.
Brett House (04:45)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Blake (05:06)
And then, then chemo labs got acquired by Groupon. So I feel like there was the great green monster was like sucking me to Groupon no matter what. But, ⁓ but.
Brett House (05:08)
Yeah.
Rio (05:13)
And this was
during like when Groupon was on that incredible trajectory, like right after the financial crisis, right? Where they went from like a little tiny startup to like a big company really quickly,
Blake (05:18)
Yeah.
It
was a total hypergrowth story. Andrew Mason, was the founding CEO, used to say, I'd rather make the mistake of growing too quickly than the mistake of growing too slowly. And he proceeded to make the mistake of growing too quickly. ⁓ So I mean, and I get his rationale, but the real mistake Groupon made and I think I think if they hadn't made this one mistake, Groupon would be ⁓ a hundred billion dollar plus company today. And they made one fatal mistake, which was going public too early.
Brett House (05:34)
Yeah.
Rio (05:35)
Ha ha ha.
Blake (05:52)
⁓ And so they they grown quickly largely by acquisition because if you're doing daily deals, right? Like basically your thing is a glorified email list the barriers to entry are like, you know, one millimeter high a kid can strip over them ⁓ and so getting big quickly mattered and and so they acquired all the Groupon clones and built a you know, like something like a 50 country I don't know exact number global business in late no time ⁓ And and it was as chaotic as you might imagine
Brett House (06:00)
Yeah.
Blake (06:21)
And then they went public and they went public without the ability to like close the books correctly and definitely without the ability to go forecast correctly. And so they got public. There was a lot of underlying weakness in the business. ⁓ And that's right. And then they couldn't forecast the most obvious stuff. so ultimately Andrew Basin got fired for missing his guidance too many times in a row.
Brett House (06:28)
Yeah.
Rio (06:34)
But then there's the scrutiny of being a public company, right? The accounting side, the transparency, right?
Brett House (06:37)
Yeah.
Yeah
Blake (06:47)
And the thing that was the fatal error is like literally there was like a known shipping bill from UPS. That was like a deck of million dollar shipping bill. And they discovered it a week after that issue guidance to the street. And they're like, ⁓ shit. So we have it was thinking like 16 million dollars or something. And they're like, we have we have eight weeks, right? We have eight weeks to find 16 million dollars in the corridor to save Andrew's job. And like the whole company went out and save Andrew's job because he was beloved inside the company.
Rio (07:03)
God.
Brett House (07:06)
that changes the economics a little bit.
Yeah.
Rio (07:16)
And I guess they
didn't find it, right?
Blake (07:17)
They
found like, it was so close. They found like 15 out of 16. It was so close.
Brett House (07:23)
Well, and during that, I'm sure there were some organizational changes. They had some synergy costs or some cost reduction that has organizational impact.
Blake (07:30)
Yeah, yeah, it was like all in to save the beloved founder.
And it's really tragic because what happened was Andrew got fired over like not be able to forecast the length of his nose. And ⁓ and then they put in somebody who was a Wall Street pleaser, who was very focused on, you know, just the next quarter, the next quarter. And at this point, Groupon had bought my company really to build what ⁓ should have been Groupon 2.0. Yes, Groupon 1.0 was the daily deal. But if you can think back,
to that era, there were so many startup ideas in local that were about digitizing the transaction. Maybe we're going to make a marketplace around theater tickets. We're going to make a marketplace around restaurant reservations. We're going to allow you to transact locally, but through your device. And the challenge with all of those ideas was the chicken and egg problem, because you needed a lot of merchants and you needed a lot of consumers. And you had to have consumer accounts and merchant accounts all at the same time. It was very difficult to bootstrap from a standing start.
Brett House (08:11)
Yeah.
Blake (08:28)
But Groupon had managed to do it. like, because the coupon, the Groupon, was the thing that got, you know, ⁓ tens of millions of consumers and hundreds of thousands of merchants to all connect to the platform. And so Andrew's vision was what he called Merchant OS. That was basically going to go, the first thing to do is basically digitize the point of sale system, because that's the transaction record authority for every local business. And then you can connect consumers and merchants digitally, and you can build all these things that are about like, you know, price.
and experience in both directions. And so we built this iPad based point of sale that was in like a dozen Michelin starred restaurants powering like the restaurant. you know, none of these restaurants, would have touched through one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This was like 2010, sorry, 2012. Anyway, so this thing was like poised to really like...
Brett House (08:57)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Rio (09:10)
And this is like first generation iPad, too, back then. This is like,
Blake (09:20)
⁓ take Groupon to the next level and get something with a durable competitive advantage, know, and the way the Daily Deal and the email list was not. And then this Wall Street pleaser comes in, doesn't get it. They kind of put, move me out of this next-gen stuff. They put me on the core business. So I owned the world's largest scale spam operation. ⁓
Rio (09:40)
How many
emails were you sending out a day or a week? must have been a staggering number, right?
Blake (09:44)
It was so
that was a too many. ⁓ So I would get this call once a quarter. I would get this call from the CEO. He's like, Blake, the quarter soft, send more email. And I'm like, I'm like, Eric, right? I was like, Eric, we did that last quarter. And then a lot of people unsubscribe. And that's why this quarter soft. Like you're taking your melting ice cube ice cube and putting it, you know, putting it on a burner. He says, we'll fix it next.
Brett House (09:47)
you
Rio (09:48)
Ha
Brett House (09:55)
That's the one lever you had to pull.
Rio (10:07)
I don't care, baton, and the torpedoes,
Brett House (10:08)
Well, yeah.
Rio (10:11)
right?
Blake (10:11)
He says, we'll fix it next quarter. And so
Brett House (10:12)
Yeah.
Blake (10:13)
we were sending four emails per customer per day.
Brett House (10:17)
Yeah, I remember getting completely slammed by, right? And so they were moving, just to dial back a little bit, you guys were moving in the direction of sort of a square space to control the point of sale where you're actually powering that, which was really early, a little ahead of the curve. Yeah.
Blake (10:21)
is insane, right?
Rio (10:23)
Yeah.
Blake (10:31)
Yeah, that's right. mean, existed.
Rio (10:33)
Well, this is before square. So you guys would have revolution, all
of this, right? All this, innovation that all this innovation that started taking place in point of sale and changing, changing that was just starting. You're right. Groupon would have been really well positioned if they could have had a piece of that.
Brett House (10:43)
Yeah. Well.
Blake (10:43)
Yeah, like that's right. And
still nobody, know, nobody has built the thing that that Groupon was working to build that I think would have succeeded at. ⁓ You know, imagine like the restaurant experience where like you open up an app, you book your restaurant reservation, let's say at ⁓ a Mexican place. As you're booking it, it's like, hey, do you want some calamari and some margaritas on the table when you get there? You're like, there's only one right answer to that. Yes.
And then because the front end connects to the back end, as it comes time for your reservation, your order fires in the kitchen at the bar, as you sit down at your table, your course comes out. And then when you're done, it's an Uber-like experience. You just get up and leave. And this could have been done, and we were building it. And in fact, there were a handful of us on the team that had the early access to it. And literally, we could walk into a bar, walk up to the bartender and say, my name is Blake. I already have a tab. And they're like, what?
Brett House (11:22)
I was gonna say Uber. This is a total Uber experience for restaurants.
Blake (11:38)
And then they look at the thing, it's like, actually you do have a tab. ⁓
Brett House (11:39)
Yeah. Yeah. Talk about taking
friction out of the process, right? Yeah. And were you guys seeing churn at Groupon from the merchants themselves? ⁓ Because a lot of, at least the anecdotal feedback that I was getting during those years was that merchants were like, listen, yeah.
Rio (11:43)
Here are your drinks, right? Yeah, that's cool.
Blake (11:50)
⁓
Rio (11:55)
They'd lose money and use offers, right?
Blake (11:56)
Yeah,
it was a merchant and customer quality death spiral, right? So, you know, ⁓ when it was first and cool, lots of merchants would try it. But what tended to happen is you got the lowest quality consumers who were deal shopping and the lowest quality merchants that were desperate for business. And then that turns into a spiral, quality spiral, right? And, you know, and then it became like, there's a Groupon deal for LASIK. But do you want the Groupon LASIK?
Brett House (12:00)
Yeah.
Totally. Yeah.
Yeah.
Rio (12:19)
Yeah, so
for customer acquisition, it was just not great because you're not getting customers with a high Life 10 value, right? Okay.
Blake (12:22)
Yeah, that's right. And that's why this 2.0
stuff was so brilliant, because it would have allowed Groupon to go upmarket. so the thing I've been pitching internally, which we would have gone do it, we would have done the reverse Groupon, where it's not half off. It's actually 50 % more. But you can get the last minute hard to get restaurant reservation. You can walk into Chipriano with no reservation and still get a table, but it's going to cost.
Brett House (12:44)
Yeah.
Blake (12:50)
And had we done that, it would have completely stopped this death spiral.
Brett House (12:55)
Yeah, and they would have had you guys would have had exclusive inventory. It's for seats in restaurants, right?
Blake (12:58)
That's right. We
had the merchants lined up for this thing, Like literally, like Alinea, which is like one of the best restaurants in the country, it's three Michelin stars in Chicago, Alinea ran on our platform and they never would have touched Groupon with a 10 foot pole. And if we'd gone to Alinea and we hadn't actually launched this yet, but we could have said, hey, we can actually help you yield manage your inventory the same way airlines do, right? ⁓ Then it would have saved Groupon, it would have revolutionized the customer experience.
Brett House (13:02)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yep. Yep. Yeah.
Blake (13:28)
it'd be at least a hundred billion dollar business today.
Rio (13:30)
Well, it could have been a whole platform.
That's interesting because you look at Applove and Brett, like in the ad tech space, they made that pivot from having mobile games and using that information to understand how to really understand attribution and serve at more targeted ads and actually go into the platform. That's interesting, Blake. mean, to think they could have done that and been a, and probably survived, right?
Blake (13:43)
Yeah. Yeah.
It was a brilliant vision and it was in execution. I think we would have had a chance of delivering it. No one to this day, no one has done it. Like OpenTable could do it. OpenTable is positioned to do this, but I don't know what they're doing. They're just like treading water. ⁓ know, it's, ⁓ know, one often thinks, I someone gets told in tech that if an idea is possible, it gets done at the earliest moment in history that it's possible.
Brett House (13:48)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Rio (14:02)
So.
Blake (14:13)
And you're always asked why now as an entrepreneur, right? And it's because of this idea that once things become possible, they get done. And it's just a great falsehood. The history doesn't move forward. Sometimes it moves backwards. And sometimes it gets stuck.
Brett House (14:24)
Yeah.
Rio (14:25)
Well, I...
Or sometimes things
get done too early, right? To your earlier point, right? When the market's not ready, could it be the tech's not ready, distribution's not ready. Sometimes things don't get done for various reasons. I I guess that's maybe a good time to pivot because Blake, the ad tech, mart tech part is really interesting. And I think that's part of the story, but part of the reason why I wanted to have you here is to think, okay, your transition from software to hardware, from software to hard tech, right? I mean, that's, I think...
Brett House (14:29)
Yeah.
Blake (14:35)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah.
Rio (14:54)
coming a bigger trend that we're seeing. Mark Andreessen, I know has talked quite a bit about it on his blog and his podcast. it's, I'd love to maybe start digging into that a little bit, like that transition. Like when did that start happening?
Blake (14:55)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah, so let me, yeah,
let me tee it up. So I've loved flight like my entire life. I started flying for fun, summer of 2000 when I was, yeah, I got my pilot's license, flew this morning to a business meeting, but unfortunately, no, I was in a little single engine, know, but yeah, I made 200 knots across the ground, know, Mach 0.3.
Rio (15:15)
You have a pilot's license, right? Yep.
Brett House (15:17)
Yeah.
Did you, did you fly at supersonic speeds?
Rio (15:27)
Ha ha ha
ha.
Brett House (15:32)
Hahahaha
Blake (15:34)
⁓ But no, so I've loved flight, ⁓ when I was in my time at Amazon, I was up in Seattle, and up in Seattle they have one of the final Concords in the museum there. So remember touring that in 2007 and thinking, how is it that the most amazing airliner ever made is in a museum and there's nothing better at an airport? And so around that time, I set a lifetime goal of breaking the sound barrier, and I put a Google alert on supersonic jet, because I kind of assumed somebody would do this, and I just wanted to be, you
Brett House (15:44)
Yeah.
Blake (16:03)
I thought I would break the sound barrier by buying a ticket. a decade goes by nearly, and it's just crickets. I'd had my time going from, frankly, the silly stuff we did at chemo labs that was almost as silly as internet coupons. Or sorry, slightly more silly than internet coupons. And so now I'm an internet coupon. I'm like the fucking spam king. Pardon my French.
Rio (16:26)
You quite literally
were, right? ⁓ and by the way, before you get into this too, like for those new audience who don't know the Concorde was the first commercial service like supersonic jet, which I'm looking at my notes here, 76. And Blake, you probably know these days better than me.
Blake (16:37)
Yeah, it first flew in
1969 and it carried the first passengers in 1976. So the moon landing and the first flight on Concorde were the same year. Yeah, and you know, and fast forward to today, can't land on the moon, can't fly supersonic. Like what? We went backwards.
Rio (16:46)
Okay, 69, yep.
And her concor research
hired in 2003, correct? So it's almost, it's been over 20 years.
Blake (16:55)
That's right. It's been, yeah,
it's approaching a quarter century that we had no commercial supersonic flight. And so I was kind of looking at this and I'm don't want the future of my life to be defined by like spam. And ⁓ I want to work on the most exciting thing that's not impossible. And so I took a deep breath and I got to look at this supersonic thing and understand why it's a bad idea that no one's pursuing. And then I will confidently move to my next idea.
And it was kind of on this premise of like, yeah, if something's doable, someone will do it. And ⁓ I just kind of wanted to know for myself why it was not doable.
Rio (17:30)
I mean, it had been doable.
The technology had been around for decades, right? Just like no one is doing it.
Blake (17:33)
Yeah. what I, you know, I
kind of thought like, so the lore back then was, ⁓ you know, it going faster inherently is more expensive and the cheapest ticket always wins. So supersonic will never be economic. And besides, you'd have to solve sonic boom and that's going to be impossible, both technically and politically, you know, so decades of R and D are going to be required and like sending your money to NASA. ⁓ Yeah, all these, all these things. And so I was like, well, okay, those are all
Brett House (17:51)
Yeah.
Yeah, sonic boom, fuel consumption, gigantic fuel consumption with the Concord, yeah.
Rio (18:00)
Plus there were laws
banning supersonic flight over the continental US as well, right?
Blake (18:03)
That's right. was actually
Brett House (18:04)
Yeah.
Blake (18:04)
it was actually illegal in the US. And so I looked at this and I'm like, OK, ⁓ these feel like qualitative answers to quantitative questions like many of the most painfully long flights are overseas where Sonic boom is a non-issue. Right. Like, what if you know what if you built an airplane that could fly transoceanic supersonic and fly under the speed of sound over land? So the boom is not a question. And like, you know, would the market be big enough? And does the technology exist?
Brett House (18:28)
Yeah.
Blake (18:33)
to do that. like the initial idea was like, hey, a lot of people fly business class today where the pitch for business class is your flight is so long, you want to sleep on it. And so you get these gigantic heavy flying beds. ⁓ But if you if the the flight were faster, you know, you don't need the bed. You could have a, you know, a nice seat instead. And, you know, you sleep on the ground. And I think everyone would treat gladly.
Rio (18:57)
And those tickets are not cheap, right? If you want to fly, let's
say, you the red eye from New York to London, you know, business class, that can be 10, $15,000, right?
Blake (19:04)
It could
be. mean, like the average is lower than that. But so our idea was, can we build a supersonic airplane with the economics of business class? And thinking about business classes, it's about 20 % of seats, but it's 80 % of international airline profits. Like all the money is at the front of the airplane. So it's like, OK, how much? And this is a question that you don't need any aerospace engineering background to answer. How much would you have to be concord by on fuel economy?
in order to have a supersonic seat with the economics of a flatbed in business class. You can answer that with like a three line spreadsheet. You can match the fuel burn if you can beat Concorde by 30%. But when you go faster, you can do more flights to same airplane and crew. So for total economics, you actually have to beat Concorde by 10%. And like, can I not find 10 % versus 1960s technology? Like really? And I had no idea, but that kind of kicked off this like seems plausible. And so I spent a year.
Brett House (19:52)
Yeah. Yeah.
Blake (19:59)
just getting, you know, basically going back to school ⁓ from textbooks. took a, or took remedial calculus and physics from Khan Academy because I hadn't had any since high school. ⁓ Right. It was, it was actually fun. It was a little intimidating because I felt like a beginner again.
Brett House (20:09)
Yeah, that's always that's always fun to jump back into. had to do that during my MBA. Yeah. Yeah, it was was a little timid
and think of like, God, this is a lot more complicated than algebra. Like it's like complex algebra. ⁓
Blake (20:19)
Yeah, yeah, well, it's calculus, right? It's,
you know, so I had to go refresh all that so I could understand the aerodynamic textbooks and, know, but,
Brett House (20:29)
Yeah. So you kind of went
back to school to kind of qualify yourself for this jump.
Blake (20:34)
Yeah,
I kind of told myself I'd saved up a little bit of the aqua hire money and I told myself like I could take a year before I really settled on my next startup. And the reality was it took like
Brett House (20:44)
Yeah.
Rio (20:46)
So at this point, you
weren't sure what you want to do. It was going to be something interesting, something new, maybe a big pivot from from ad tech, let's say, right?
Blake (20:50)
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, I like, I kept turning over cards in the supersonic thing and they kept coming up positive. And then there was a moment in July of 14 when I had a spreadsheet model of the airplane and a spreadsheet model of the market. And they basically said with believable levels of technology improvement, or at least what I thought was believable, levels of technology improvement, efficiency improvement versus Concorde, there was going be a buildable airplane.
Brett House (20:55)
Yeah.
Blake (21:17)
And then the market spreadsheet said if such an airplane existed, ⁓ it would have a gigantic market. And I took both of those spreadsheets to a professor at Stanford who'd done some supersonics research. I was like, dude, I don't know what I'm doing because I've been at this for like two seconds. And this is all based on assumptions. It could be garbage in, garbage out. Would you look at this and check my math and validate my assumptions? And he looks at it, he clicks around, he's like, Blake, all these assumptions are conservative. You should really be more aggressive. And I remember leaving his office and I felt like I was in this sort of like drunken stupor.
Brett House (21:47)
Yeah, well.
Blake (21:47)
⁓
I don't know how in the world it is that I am the soul on the planet with the literal formula for supersonic passenger flight. like this, my resume is like, I'm the ad tech guy from Amazon and Groupon. ⁓
Brett House (21:56)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Rio (22:03)
The email spam
Brett House (22:04)
Yeah,
Rio (22:04)
king, right?
Brett House (22:04)
well, it's funny because I mentioned Neil deGrasse Tyson in the beginning because I'd heard him say something when I saw when Rio started talking about you. was like, you know, I've thought about this like, like, I'd love to hear you talk about the evolution of innovation in aviation, right? Because there is kind of, I think, a false narrative out there. And he kind of calls this out that there hasn't been any innovation, right? Since the 1960s, right?
And he said that the industry sort of moved away from sort of this sort of futurism. Yeah, No, no, no, but he said he said there's been innovation, innovation in engine technology, so you have better, better fuel efficiency, noise ⁓ suppression, so the planes are a lot less noisy, both from a flying perspective as well as inside the cabin reliability safety. So it's micro improvements associated with improving certain aspects of flight, not just the speed is that.
Rio (22:34)
Well, this is a great stagnation theory, right?
Blake (22:35)
I think Neil's completely wrong.
Yeah.
There's a little bit of truth to that, but it misses the big picture. So I think it's mostly a false narrative. Like yes, engines have gotten more efficient, airplanes have gotten safer. What we've done is we've swapped out a lot of the technology. the analog in computing would be, imagine we'd had the Univac, like the mainframe computer that is affordable to the bank and the size of a room. And ⁓ then what we have today,
Brett House (22:59)
Accurate or is that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm watching Mad Men and they
just installed one of those in Mad Men in the series that I'm gonna do.
Blake (23:29)
Right. So but
imagine today we have a computer, we have a much more advanced computer that also fills the size of the room and is affordable to the bank and the IRS. And it's but it's got better CPUs and more memory and like, you know, it's more power efficient. Like, there's been all this innovation. No, there isn't. The computer is still the size of a fucking room. ⁓ You know, and you can't carry it around with you in your pocket. And that's what's happened in aviation. We've made the machine more efficient, but we haven't made the human more efficient. And if you look at the history of flight,
Brett House (23:43)
Yeah.
That's yeah, that's true.
Blake (23:59)
from the Wright brothers through to 1958. What you find is every successive generation of airplane was faster than the one that had come before it. And what it enabled was the core mission of the airplane. The core, like why do airplanes exist? You know, why not? Like what would be wrong in the world if you got rid of airplanes? Well, you can't go places when it takes too long to get to them, right? When, you know, when you're, when your ability to go from New York to San Francisco is via a train, it takes six days and you mostly don't go.
Right? When your option to go to Europe is a steamship, you mostly don't go. You know, it doesn't matter if it's a really cheap steamship, you can't afford the time. Right? And so what the airplane fundamentally lets you do is see the power of speed. It lets you go places and do things that otherwise wouldn't be practical. That is literally the point of an airplane. And so when I say innovation stopped, what I mean is the primary vector of improving what airplanes do at their fundamental purpose stopped. And it stopped because
Brett House (24:56)
Yeah. Did you get you
from point A to point B fast.
Blake (25:00)
That's right. we just, you know, we literally froze speed. And then when you add in all the externalities and the security and the airport line and congestion, all that other bullshit, got slower.
Rio (25:04)
And how much of that was because of...
So how much of that Blake is because like, like the Concord program itself was fun was fundamentally flawed, right? Whereas in my understanding is the French and British governments that went in this arms race were like whoever pulled out the other had to pay everything. And it was never like, it never worked economically. The seats were horrifically. think there were $20,000 in money back then or something like that. I mean, I could probably wrong in that they're horribly expensive. They never flew more than 50 % full really. It was a failed model, right? And how much of this great stagnation.
Blake (25:16)
Yeah.
Yeah. So this
Brett House (25:35)
Yeah, only 20 planes were ever built.
Blake (25:38)
is a multi-layer onion. Let's start with the outer layer and let's peel it back. And by the time of the end of the day, this will be crying from the onion or just the pain of the story. So the outer layer is what Rio said is correct. Here's an airplane that's got 100 seats on it, 100 uncomfortable seats. Think the back of a Southwest Airlines jet. $20,000 a pop.
And it's the 1970s kind of travel demand. And the price is basically four times a first class ticket if you adjust for inflation. ⁓ And at the time, if you said, well, how many seats can you fill in first class on a 747, they typically had about 40. So it's 2 and 1 half times more seats to fill at a substantially higher fare. And guess what? It just doesn't work, right?
Like, look, this is Econ 101. The more expensive a thing, the fewer people who buy it. Right? And so if supersonic flight's going to cost more than subsonic, you need to start out with fewer seats. Right? So you just couldn't fill the airplane. And like, not filling the seats on an airplane, it's like spoiled groceries in a grocery store. If you take off with an empty seat, that's just waste. It's pure waste. Right? And then so it flies half empty. And because of this, even on the most
The best route on the planet for this is New York, London, because that's rock stars and royalty. ⁓ But it's half empty on that route, which means it definitely can't fly any other route. You get five passengers. You can't make any money. So this is the ultimate story of Concord. The concept didn't make any sense.
Rio (27:14)
And it can't
fly New York, LA because of these laws, correct?
Blake (27:17)
⁓ So what happened was, ⁓ so prior to the supersonic, the abortive supersonic age, ⁓ every major new airplane had been entrepreneurial and commercially led. so like the DC-3, which was from Douglas, the first real successful airliner, ⁓ they built it because Douglas thought that there was an airplane there that could operate at fares that passengers would pay, that would fill enough seats that airlines could be profitable at quantity.
And so there was this fundamental profit-seeking motive. If you can't operate the airplane profitably, nobody wants to make it. And so it would drive, it was like Adam Smith's invisible hand made sure that we didn't build airplanes that were too stupid. ⁓ But what happened with supersonic, and I think some of this is like Cold War era JFK stuff, like JFK said we're gonna go to the moon. And he also said we're gonna have a supersonic airplane. And so in the 1960s, while there was the space race, there was also a supersonic race.
And the French and British kind of handcuffed themselves together and did Concorde. The Soviets did what became the TU-144. People called it Concordesky. And there was an American SST, supersonic transport, that the FAA specced. ⁓ It was even a dumber idea than Concorde. It was 300 seats Mach 3. Like, that thing made no economic sense. Like, it would have been great, but for the three...
Rio (28:34)
Wow.
That would have been New York,
New York to LA in like an hour or something like that. Right.
Blake (28:40)
right?
You know, you know, for the three people that could afford to fly on it, right? Out of the 300 seats. Like this made no sense. And then so Congress pulls the plug on SST because the taxpayers are paying for it. Boeing never would have paid for that thing because they're smarter if you know it was a dumb idea. But Uncle Sam was paying the bill. Now that gets canceled. The project gets canceled. But Concord is still coming. And it's not completely obvious that Concord is DOA. Concord is in fact DOA. But it's not obvious. So what happens?
The, you know, basically Boeing funds the budding environmental lobby to make a big ruckus about Sonic Boom supposedly being terrible. And ⁓ now we ban supersonic flight in the US. Total regulatory capture, right? You know, which I think is evil. ⁓ And so we literally, we banned the primary vector of innovation in flight. ⁓ And, you know, and I don't think it's an accident that half a century later,
Rio (29:20)
So was just regulatory capture basically.
Blake (29:35)
I mean, so think about like where the best and the brightest kids go to work, right? Like when I was growing up, Boeing was just redesigning the same airplane over and over again. They put new materials and better engines, but it was the same fricking airplane. It didn't do anything new and different. And so although I love flight, never went into that. I went into tech where new things were happening, right? And so there's a whole generation of talented young people. They wouldn't want to touch Boeing with a 10-foot pole. They want to go work on new things. And so it's not a surprise you wake up and it's the 2020s.
And Boeing's hollowed out. They can't do anything competently. ⁓ They can't even install the bulls.
Rio (30:11)
Well, just like Groupon,
they put one of these like Wall Street, like NBA kind of like bean counters in charge, right? I mean, that's what Boeing ended up doing.
Blake (30:15)
Yay. That's right. That's right.
it wasn't, ironically, counting the beans in the next quarter is the surest way to destroy the business. And we saw that at Groupon, if you only focus on the next quarter, you crash the business. And aviation's even stronger. it's not that Boeing was profit focused and profit focused causes a safety disaster. That's kind of the story. The short term profit focus is what causes the safety disaster. ⁓
Brett House (30:24)
Yeah.
Yeah, the short-termism.
Blake (30:44)
The short-term, the profit-seeking, I strongly believe is actually really important. And had Concord had a profit-seeking element to it, it would not have been so stupid. ⁓ It's the short-termism that's deadly. And it's like, imagine trying to fly an airplane while only staring straight down. Like, you can't tell where you're headed, and you might be okay for a little bit, but pretty soon you're gonna be in some not-good place in the sky. And that's what happened at Groupon, it's what happened at Boeing. It's the short-termism that's deadly. Yeah, that's...
Brett House (30:55)
Yeah.
Yeah, and straight down is the next quarter versus a year out, two years
out, the long vision. But isn't that how...
Blake (31:15)
Aviation
business you got to think you got to think in like decades You can't be short-term and if you know and Bezos got this at Amazon, know and Bezos famously had a seven-year time horizon for Investments and he was willing to do these things that you know people would laugh at for a long time You know AWS was laughed at
Brett House (31:18)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Rio (31:34)
Didn't make any money for years, years and years and years. Now look at it, yeah.
Brett House (31:34)
Yeah. Yeah.
Blake (31:35)
No, it was laughed at internally.
Like a whole bunch of the team at Amazon, I didn't get it at first. I laughed at it. I was dead wrong. I remember S3 launched and like the scuttlebutt was, we built this incredibly sophisticated distributed system for S3, ⁓ but we could have just bought a hard disk for the amount of stuff that's actually stored on it. And that was my perspective at the time and it was incredibly myopic. Jeff was right.
So you got to have a longer term perspective or you do really stupid things. So at any rate, OK, so just keep asking why here, right? I think the core of the why that we lost our way in flight is we lost Adam Smith's invisible hand that was the entrepreneurially driven, commercially driven. You got to make products that actually have a market. And sometimes if you get it wrong, you'd at least try.
Rio (32:26)
But like, as part of this, the great stagnation,
cause you know, there's that theory that like up until the fifties, like all of the low hanging fruit was, was, was knocked out. And then the harder things are made. I don't know if I buy that by the way. And then, but to your point, maybe it's just the wrong focus on things like, cause I see this recent pivot back into hard tech and back into building like, you know, from, from electrons to atoms, right? I mean, that, that's, that's the expression I've heard quite a bit.
Blake (32:42)
It was.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, mean, the so my theory for a long, I don't think the low hanging fruit got plucked. I think we just stopped plucking the fruit. ⁓ But so with flight, Concorde should not have been the first supersonic passenger plane. What we should have had, and I've been saying this for 10 years, ⁓ what we should have had first was a small private jet for a handful of people whose time was most valuable.
who are most willing to pay for time savings. A small concept, on a small airplane, you can make quiet more easily than a large one. Cost wouldn't really matter for the ultra wealthy. And then that starts this kind of flywheel effect, the same way like cell phones, computers. That's right. This is the way almost every new technology works. Start at a high price point for a small market and you come down over time. then, you know, now our kids have cell phones in their pockets, right?
Brett House (33:22)
The proof of concept,
Yeah.
Rio (33:33)
Well, that's what Tesla did with the Roadster, right? Which is very expensive, right?
Blake (33:44)
So that's what should have happened. I've been telling this story for 10 years. And then a few months ago, I got this weird packet in the mail and someone had heard me tell that story. He's like, by the way, you don't know that wasn't theory. That was real. Here's the business plan. And here are these like these like, you know, kind of Manila old ⁓ foils from the 1970s. And it was literally the blueprints and the business plan.
for the supersonic private jet that was getting developed in the late 60s into the early 70s that got killed by the speed ban.
Rio (34:17)
so it was a regulatory capture that killed it. okay.
Brett House (34:17)
Yeah.
Blake (34:18)
So it was the regulatory capture.
Brett House (34:19)
Yeah.
Wait, this is the same Mach 3 that's seated 300 or is this a different?
Blake (34:25)
No, no, no,
this was, it would have seeded like, I forget the size, it was five to 10 people. And it would have gone Mach 2.2. That was that particular concept. you know, but it, it, it, it, it, Someone was actually doing the thing that would have been the tippy end of the spear and would all be going Mach 5 by now. you think, you know, we know the phrase minimum viable product, right? The minimum viable supersonic jet back then should have been a small private jet. But when you ban supersonic over land...
Brett House (34:28)
okay, okay. Yeah.
Yeah.
Rio (34:35)
So someone was actually doing it. Like innovation was continuing. That's wild.
Brett House (34:51)
Yeah, back to that.
Blake (34:54)
that you can't do the minimum viable product. The minimum viable product is for a wealthy person to get from Tito Borough to San Francisco really quickly, right? But if you can't fly supersonic over land, that product doesn't make sense. Most private jet travel is over land, not over water. So this notion of like, we'll build an over water only private jet, there's no market for that. So it doesn't justify the development cost. And so the whole industry just goes into this holding pattern and the best and brightest young people go into ad tech.
Rio (35:24)
They went to software, all of them. mean.
Blake (35:26)
Yeah,
I mean, I'm not kidding. you know, like all the... Had I been bored at a different time, I would have worked at Boeing.
Brett House (35:34)
Yeah, very interesting. So can you walk us through how you architected the &E? Because you guys started off by renting your jet engine, right? Was it from Rolls Royce that I read correctly?
Blake (35:35)
Not on Amazon.
I think you've got two stories mucked together there. I'll give you the TLDR and I'll give you little bit more of the story. The TLDR is, you know, on day one, our plan was to build our own engine from scratch. And I very foolishly let myself get talked out of that. And we had a, test airplane actually had an old GE engine on it that happened to be the right size and we didn't need a custom one. But for the production airliner, we knew we needed at least a semi-custom engine.
Brett House (35:52)
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Blake (36:13)
And we spent years of my life that I will never get back trying to convince a major engine company to do it with us. And the most insane thing about that story is that it almost worked. ⁓ Like literally, well, so, because it's fundamentally really dumb idea, like a startup is going to get a hundred year old, like stodgy old company to develop a custom jet engine. know, like, like, like that. I can you imagine SpaceX had they outsourced the rocket engines? There's no way.
Brett House (36:20)
Yeah.
Rio (36:25)
Why didn't it work?
Brett House (36:41)
Yeah. ⁓
Blake (36:42)
There's no way.
Rio (36:43)
This is the reason why they brought everything in house, right? It's just the same reason why you did.
Blake (36:45)
There's a reason that you have to, right? Like, if Elon had gone to Aerojet for a rocket engine, they'd have studied the thing for five years before they maybe decided to give him an old space shuttle engine. And that's exactly what happened with us in Rolls-Royce. They studied the thing for five years, and they're like, well, maybe we'll give you an old modified Trent. And the amazing thing is it almost worked. The airplane would almost barely close around the engine.
Um, it couldn't have done boomless. Uh, the engine wasn't good enough. Um, and, uh, you know, and it got to the point of a board approval at roles and, like I knew they were having the board meeting that day and I was expecting the call from our champion afterwards to tell me how the board meeting got, cause they were, they were looking to get the green light to go forward with us. Uh, and it's an insane thing that we ever got that close. This is after like, this was, I mean, this was 2022, the company had been founded 2014.
Brett House (37:14)
Yeah.
Rio (37:31)
And this is after years, correct? Correct, right?
Blake (37:40)
And so I'd spent, what is that, seven, eight years chasing Rolls-Royce, like foolishly. They came back, well, they said, well, we thought we were going to get approval for this, but actually what happened was the CEO got fired. And I was like, uh-oh. And I went through all the stages of grief, starting with denial. like, I'll find a way to save this thing. so, you know, but by the middle of the year, it was clear, like we had to find a different way. And, you know, when we were...
Brett House (37:42)
Yeah.
Rio (37:46)
And I'm guessing they came back and said no after all that.
Brett House (37:53)
Yeah, yeah.
Rio (37:55)
That's not good, right?
Brett House (37:58)
You
Yeah.
Rio (38:08)
So it took seven
years to go through all this nonsense with the roles, but then you ended up designing. Did you already have plans? Like, how did you so quickly then pivot to design your own?
Blake (38:10)
That's right.
We had like, you know,
it was, so the key moment for me personally, so it was early 22, I was like, we got to spin up a plan B. We started working on how would we do this ourselves? But my own team didn't believe in it. Because all the lore was only three companies in the world could build large jet engines. Like you couldn't possibly do it as a startup. We were publicly associated with Rolls-Royce at this point. And like people believed in the company because Rolls-Royce was working with us.
Brett House (38:34)
Yeah.
Rio (38:41)
Including our investors, I'm guessing too, right?
Blake (38:43)
Yeah, like every,
Brett House (38:43)
Yeah.
Blake (38:44)
you know, so that was, you know, that was the plan. I remember going to a talk that Brian Chesky gave the founding CEO of Airbnb and he was telling the story of leading Airbnb through COVID where they'd been on the precipice of IPO, then COVID hit and overnight 80 % of their revenue disappeared. And so, and the thing Brian said on stage was, you know, when you're in a crisis,
Rio (38:52)
Airbnb,
Blake (39:10)
The tempting thing is to compromise and do whatever you have to do to survive. ⁓ But what you really have to do is look deep inside yourself, ask yourself, who were you meant to be all along? Who are you in your deepest self? And do more of that. And ⁓ it was as if Brian had sat on stage and said, boom, should build their own jet engine, because that's what I heard. ⁓
Brett House (39:29)
Anyway,
you did not have a plan B at this point like you had to put together plan B late in the game
Blake (39:33)
We were like, it
was like plan lowercase b. Like it was like in a microscope. Like, yeah, like it was, we had zero engine designers on staff. ⁓ And so.
Brett House (39:37)
I'm surprised that during that seven year trajectory you didn't actually have a fully
Yeah. So what does it what
does it take to architect a boomless engine in? OK. Yeah.
Blake (39:50)
Well, let me come back to that and kind of tell a bit of the story because that will take
us down to different technical vector, which is fun but different. But the long story short, I knew we had to go do an engine. then while we were incubating, we were baking the engine plan, I'm out to dinner with a supplier and my phone starts blowing up because Rolls has gone to the press and broken up with us publicly. And they just totally shivved us with no warning.
Brett House (40:12)
god.
Rio (40:13)
no, they just went and did this proactively? it's terrible. And I bet
your phone's blowing up from your investors then, right? Like what is going on?
Blake (40:21)
yeah, it basically blows up.
you know, we had been high flying to give you a of the stage of this. We hadn't flown our test airplane yet, but United had ordered ⁓ every major tier one supplier that builds parts for Boeing and Airbus had signed up with us. looked like Rolls Royce was with us. then then American Airlines joined United with an order with a deposit. We had orders of deposits United, American, a preorder from Japan Airlines like this thing looks like it's actually going. And then Rolls Royce breaks up with us.
Rio (40:40)
You already had orders on the books, correct? Right?
Blake (40:49)
And instantly nobody wanted to partner, nobody wanted to order, nobody wanted to work at the company, no one would invest in the company. I remember going to like, it was a nightmare. I remember going to these aviation conferences. I get booed on stage. I did a press conference and I get asked, did you see that tweet that said boomer the next Theranos, what's your comment? I'm like, great.
Brett House (40:52)
Yeah.
Rio (40:57)
I'm sure Twitter was just a nightmare with all that. I'm sure.
Blake (41:15)
But the punchline is it was the best thing that ever happened because we did find a way to go do our own jet engine. Because of that, we can make a fundamentally much better, more efficient one, cheaper, faster for less capital. And this means two really important things for the business. The smaller thing is because we can customize the engine completely versus a shoehorned engine, it can do boomless cruise, which means we can fly cross-continent with no sonic boom. So...
Brett House (41:36)
Yep.
Blake (41:43)
Bam, that opens up the market. It removes the single biggest blocker. And the other thing, which I think is actually even more important, is because we own the jet engine, we can deploy it for alternate applications. that's right. So we take our supersonic engine technology, instead of putting a fan on it that pushes the airplane forward, we put a generator on it. It makes 42 megawatts.
Rio (41:55)
And that's the turbine business for power generation, right?
Blake (42:08)
of ⁓ the highest availability, highest quality electricity you can get out of a turbine. ⁓ And so we launched that last year, and I've got demand out the wazoo. And it solves the other biggest problem we have, which is how do you finance a multi-billion dollar airplane development as a startup? Well, great. Now, I remember we used to joke if we were an AI company, it'd be so much easier to raise money. Well, great. We actually are an AI company now. We're building behind the meter power generation for AI that allows data centers to
Brett House (42:28)
Ha!
Blake (42:37)
create their own electricity, and do it without using any water.
Rio (42:40)
Well,
with a data center build out that makes so much sense. How many is you pre-sold or sold? mean.
Blake (42:43)
Right? ⁓
have, demand is just seems like infinite. Like my phone, my phone's ringing off the hook. You I have to make sure we end on time because I've got a major hyperscaler calling me. ⁓ Like, yeah, so it's, ⁓ if we had 10 gigawatts of these things in a warehouse right now, they'd fly out tomorrow. Like I literally get calls where people say like, can you give me turbines? I need turbines desperately. And I'm like, hang on guys, I got to build them first. It's the bottle.
Rio (42:48)
I'm sure.
Brett House (42:53)
Yep, there we go.
Rio (43:01)
I'm sure.
Because that is the bottleneck for AI right now is actually,
Brett House (43:08)
Yeah, it's power generation.
Rio (43:09)
is power.
Blake (43:10)
Yeah,
the bottleneck for AI is power. The bottleneck for power is turbines. The bottleneck for turbines is the turbine supply chain. And we're building our turbines from scratch from raw materials ourselves. So we overcome the supply chain bottlenecks. And then so we get to make all this power, it generates a bunch of cash that funds the airplane. yeah, yeah, we're doing this domestically. Like I literally, I'm looking out the window from my office and I can see the building where we're like literally making turbine parts from scratch from raw materials.
Brett House (43:25)
And you're doing it in the US, right? You're doing it in Greensboro? Yeah, which is incredible, right? Talk about.
Got it, got it. I think we need you in...
Rio (43:40)
So Blake, so kind of like the analogy
would be Starlink is funding SpaceX. The turbine business is funding Boom Supersonic.
Blake (43:44)
That's right. That's right.
Brett House (43:46)
Yeah.
Blake (43:47)
That's right.
Brett House (43:47)
Yeah. And you don't see yourself taking yourself off the supersonic jet path in support of turbine. These things are symbiotic in a way.
Blake (43:52)
No, not at all. no, I mean, one of the most,
it's super symbiotic. mean, you know, one of the things that annoys me is people are like, it's such a brilliant pivot. And I'm like, it's not a pivot. Like, we need to invent a new term for it. I call it a boomerang. Because a boomerang goes, and you go over here, then you come right back. You know, like, basically, we found, you if you think of the airplane, you know, the airplane has got an airplane part and an engine part, right?
Brett House (44:01)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Blake (44:16)
And by definition, the airplane as a whole is more complicated than one component. We found a way to sell one component by itself. It can sell the engine by itself. And then we can sell the airplane and the engine as a combination. And so it is absolutely on path to the supersonic jet. just pulls revenue years to the last.
Rio (44:34)
So instead of having to just
continually raise more and more money, which could have its challenges, I'm guessing, right? Now you have a way to generate cash.
Blake (44:38)
It's yeah, I mean we you know
That's right. I mean this company almost went bankrupt several times we got down to seven days of cash at one point. I don't recommend that ⁓ and ⁓ know, and now we have literally in the bank all the money we ever need We have in the bank all the money we ever need because we've got enough money to ship the turbine And the surebun turbine makes the money to ship the jet. So at this point, you know How quickly does a jet come? know our our goal is to be in the air in four years
Brett House (44:48)
Yeah.
Blake (45:06)
You know, will it happen exactly that fast? I don't know. But I do think it's inevitable. unless we screw it up, there are going to be supersonic enabled power turbines and there are going to be supersonic passenger jets and everyone listening is going to get to fly on them in our lifetimes.
Rio (45:23)
But
like, find it so crazy that it's like, I'm not saying anyone, but it could have been done for these last few decades. was really, technology was there. I'm sure it sounds like you've created some new technology and it's, you know, the new engine, for example. I'm sure there's other things you've invented too, but like it's incredible to think it was there. It was low hanging fruit in many ways.
Blake (45:30)
⁓ that's right.
Yet what.
It was there. I
mean, guess if it takes me 15 years to do this, how low hanging was the fruit really? But ⁓ it was definitely possible. And in fact, the company could have been started 10 years earlier than it actually was, and all the technology and regulatory basis was there. So I think one of my biggest takeaways from this story is everyone tends to believe if it's a good idea, somebody smart's already seen it. And it's just baloney.
Rio (45:49)
Right?
Blake (46:10)
It's just baloney. Like the world is a lot smaller than we're told. And it is full of good ideas that are executable, hiding in plain sight that nobody is doing. And instead we all tend to get, you we get to get, you know, this was my mom's advice. know, Blake, got to find, you know, you should work on what you know about. And you go find your little, right? Yeah, yeah, it was terrible advice, mom. ⁓ But you know, it's classic advice.
Rio (46:31)
Well, you broke that rule, right? Or you didn't listen to that advice.
Brett House (46:37)
You
Blake (46:39)
Classic advice, right? Like work on what you know on and like, you know, don't, and go find your niche in the world.
Rio (46:44)
You
still would have been an ad tech. Maybe you still would have been pumping out emails, right? you listen to that.
Blake (46:47)
I would have
been incredibly good at a tiny slice of the world, and I would have left nothing behind that was new, not that mattered, and I wouldn't have been all that happy. ⁓
Brett House (47:04)
Well, they
do say that founders don't have a choice, right? There is like this driving need to build and to make and to bring something in. You know, do you really have a... Yeah.
Blake (47:12)
I mean, I don't know, it felt like I had a choice. I really struggled with a choice.
So it was 2014, there I am in California, and I have, the closest thing to an aviation credential I have is my pilot's license, so great, I can fly a Cessna. And I've got this idea for a supersonic jet, it's a crazy thing to...
to tell anybody, let alone yourself, that you're going to go do, because if it works, it's part of history. And so it's kind of a mindfuck. And I remember going to my friends, and I'm like, I think I might do this supersonic thing. And you just kind of watch the oxygen leave the room, the eyes roll back. One guy told me, call me back when you got something less pie in the sky. And then eventually, I pitched one friend, and he's like, Blake, this makes sense. The math is there. You should go do it.
Brett House (47:57)
you
Blake (48:05)
And I was like, you know, and later on I was doing a this guy, this is Avichal, who's now co-founder of Electric Capital, you know, a great entrepreneur investor in his own right. And he was he was interviewing me for his podcast a few years ago. And I said, Avichal, thank you for being the first first person who believed. And he said, dude, I didn't believe I thought you were bat shit crazy. I just didn't have the heart to tell you. I should be a good friend. I'm like, great. And they won. Nobody believed nobody.
Rio (48:28)
I've just been a good friend.
Blake (48:35)
And ⁓ yet, I would not have wanted to spend the rest of my life. I I love ad tech. And we can go back and talk about ad tech stories, and I'll get fired up about it. But I don't think I would have left anything new in the world in ad tech.
Rio (48:48)
like maybe next time we can have you back going to tell some like vintage ad tech stories. We still didn't get your like best best anecdote about Jeff Bezos. That's for sure. We do know that you do have to drop at the top of the hours. Let's maybe go into some quick hits if you want to pivot into there. You want to start Brett?
Blake (49:00)
Okay, let's do it.
Brett House (49:02)
Sure, favorite aircraft of all time.
Blake (49:07)
Excuse me, I took a sip at the wrong time. SR-71 Blackbird by far, ⁓ theoretically a Mach 3.2 jet, probably actually much faster than that, built in the 60s, ⁓ shut down with no replacement, can't do it now. ⁓ Best jet ever, I want to top that.
Rio (49:28)
What's the hardest thing you've ever had to do from scratch?
Blake (49:29)
Cough cough
hardest thing I ever had to do from scratch, build the team. We're building a team, we're a company in an industry where the last startup was Douglas Aircraft in 1921. so getting people who are both technically capable and are the right people for a startup and building that culture, that's far and away the most difficult thing I've done.
Brett House (49:54)
Yeah. What were your key learnings from taking two companies that you've startups that were not totally successful, at least in your estimation? How did you bring that to boom, that learning?
Blake (49:59)
Yeah.
Yeah, well that
I mean, so
my first company that I founded, Kima, I worked on what my resume is that I should work on, right? I thought I knew e-commerce from Amazon, and I thought I knew mobile from, you Pelago, and so I thought I should work on mobile e-commerce. And so, you know, it was very logical, and investors would take the call, but I had no product vision. And there wasn't anything we were building that I desperately wanted to exist in the world. And so I thought, well, that's backwards. Instead of, you know, because I know every startup is going to have a hard day.
Brett House (50:28)
Yeah.
Blake (50:37)
And I don't want to think on the hard day, I wish I'd never tried. wish I could just get out of this. And so I said, I want to work on what I want to create in the world, not what my resume says I can do. I'll just see how much I can learn. And so that mindset was like, I'm going to have to learn. I'm going to learn the technology. I'm going to have to learn the industry. I'm going have to learn a lot of skills that I didn't have. I couldn't have sold you a dollar bill for $0.50. So I knew I'd have to reinvent myself.
in order to do this. I mean, it takes courage, but the courage makes up... I had no confidence. I had no idea if this was going to work. And ultimately, I decided I'd rather fail than wonder what would happen if I tried. And that was the key decision. Once it came down to courage, it was easy, but it took a moment to see it in terms of courage.
Brett House (51:09)
And that takes confidence and courage, right?
That's a great.
Rio (51:31)
What's one technology, doesn't have to be in the airline industry, what's one technology everyone is underestimating or not talking about enough?
Blake (51:39)
This is funny, but AI, ⁓ massively underestimated. And in particular, I think the AI is going to take jobs narrative is completely back ass words. we ran an experiment. All right, well, guess maybe you guys are already here. But I'll tell a story that I think illustrates this. we did a, I wanted to get the company AI-pilled. So we stopped all project work for a week.
Rio (51:54)
100 % agree, by the way.
Brett House (51:55)
Yeah,
we talk about that a lot on the pod. Yep.
Blake (52:07)
⁓ And we said everybody work in teams of one two or three on whatever you think is the most important thing It doesn't matter if you succeed or fail But you have to use AI and you have to demo in front of the entire company at end of the week and I thought we'd get like a few dozen silly things and a couple things that were innovative enough that changed the direction of the company and what we got was Two or three things actually no three or four things that changed the trajectory of the company Another few dozen things that were useful and two or three things that were silly
And ⁓ what I, including like the receptionist, the shipping and receiving associate, who is the lowest level employee in the entire company, built a vibe code and a shipping and receiving tool such that all packages, so all employees could track their inbound inventory, ⁓ self-serve. And I'm like, wait a minute, how is it that like the lowest level employee to the highest level employee can make something useful here? And what I realized is what's gonna go on here is there are, you know,
Brett House (52:37)
which is incredible.
Rio (52:56)
That is wild.
Blake (53:04)
Corby the person who has no idea about what proctor service exists in the world. Almost everybody has some idea, but has no, you know, they don't have the skills or background or capital to go actually create something. And what AI is doing is allowing anybody to go turn their idea into reality. And so I think what happens, and this is the paradox, individual teams get smaller, right? Because you can do more with smaller numbers of people. And there's huge leverage in that because you don't have the communication overhead of a big team. Brett's right.
Rio (53:29)
You can do, and people can do specialized skills who are just generalists or
Brett House (53:32)
Yeah.
Rio (53:32)
they say skills, don't know that well. Yeah.
Blake (53:32)
That's right. So what happens is
you have a proliferation of small teams. So I think one of the biggest winners in AI is actually the Y Combinator, because what we need is an explosion of entrepreneurship, an explosion of startups. And I think we're going to have a large number of small teams, and we're going to have more innovators than ever before, because the barrier to creation just dropped.
Brett House (53:53)
The period of intrusion, yeah, for sure. Well, that is a good way to end this podcast. I think we might have to have ⁓ a version two, ⁓ phase two of this conversation. But thank you for joining us, Blake. This was great, great to hear your story. Good luck with your call with the hyperscaler. And for everybody that's listening, it's made through this episode, check us out at debdebdev.signalandnoise.ai, as well as YouTube.
Rio (53:56)
think we've already seen that, yeah.
It was great play. It was cool. It was fun.
Brett House (54:18)
Spotify and Apple podcasts and we will see you next time. Thanks.
Rio (54:23)
Thanks, Blake.
Blake (54:24)
Thanks, bye now.
All right, so I know the drill, don't leave before it's done uploading, all that.
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